1 of 2
LAURA ROCKETT PHOTOGRAPHY
2 of 2
LAURA ROCKETT PHOTOGRAPHY
In the 1870s when Maclin Hezekiah Davis sipped the cold, clear water of Cascade Springs, he didn’t know he would make history.
He simply wanted the purest water to produce exquisite whiskey. A master distiller, Davis soon founded Cascade Hollow Distilling Co. in nearby Tullahoma, where he created fine whiskeys (including the now-famous George Dickel Whiskey) from Tennessee spring water.
It’s a story from history’s mists that a Davis descendant, great-grandson Dave Goetz, conserves through Davis-centric heirlooms, including antique whiskey bottles and the distillery’s original clock. Goetz and his wife, Katy Varney, display these treasures in Goetz’s childhood home in Nashville, where five generations of his relatives made memories.
“There were countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners in the house,” Goetz remembers. “Family came down from Kentucky and up from Tullahoma.” When Varney and Goetz gained ownership of the home, a 1928 Tudor Revival cottage, they decided to make additions to showcase the relics of Maclin Hezekiah Davis and the Cascade Hollow Distilling Co., as well as other family heirlooms. They also wanted to add the hotel-like comfort of enlarged bedrooms with private bathrooms for visiting adult children; the couple has two.
“What mother doesn’t want her children to stay longer?” Varney says. Goetz and Varney tapped Nashville architect Michael Marchetti to remodel the property so they could better enjoy the cottage, inside and outside, with friends and family. The plan was to add upgrades—especially a big, modern kitchen—while retaining the home’s memories and its historic designation as a Tudor Revival structure. (The latter is of great importance in the neighborhood, the coveted 12 blocks of the Richland-West End Historic District, which carefully controls any remodeling of its 70-ish historic homes.)
Marchetti appreciates the Tudor Revival style of architecture, noting how different the historical style is to the wide-open floor plans of today, which he feels lose a sense of surprise. “When I come into a house, I don’t want to see the whole house,” Marchetti says. “I want to be drawn in.”
Tudor Revival interiors do just that using arched doors, beamed ceilings, and a rabbit’s warren of rooms and anterooms that create a sense of coziness. Then there are its unmistakable exterior details: pale stucco, half timbers, gabled dormer windows, and latticed windowpanes. In the 1920s, when Tudor Revival cottages became fashionable, chic Americans from Hollywood to Lake George swooned over the romantic style. It sprinkled the architectural charm of a medieval English village into neighborhoods populated by Foursquare, Art Deco, and Craftsman styles.
1 of 2
LAURA ROCKETT PHOTOGRAPHY
2 of 2
LAURA ROCKETT PHOTOGRAPHY
The art of home remodeling yields limitless opportunities, but Marchetti knew to tread with care when creating the architectural drawings for the historic cottage. (The architectural review administered by the Metropolitan Historic Zoning Commission is notoriously strict about remodeling landmark homes in the Richland-West End Historic District.) Marchetti’s plans added various rooms to the existing structure: a primary bedroom, kitchen, screened porch, and separate two-car garage that features an in-law suite. He reconfigured some existing rooms’ uses in the interior and enhanced others. Then there were the cosmetic exterior updates, including a new entryway, terrace, porte cochère, and steel windows. His team’s craftsman ultimately reused materials from the original structure, such as stones and windows.
After Marchetti presented his preliminary drawing, he says, “The board approved it and was quite complimentary in how tasteful we were and how the plan complemented the sense of scale and hierarchy of massing consistent with Tudor Revival style.”
To extend the outdoor usage of the home, Marchetti designed a 20-by- 20-foot interior courtyard that creates a dramatic focal point at the rear of the property. The walls of four rooms enclose the space: the family room, screened porch, kitchen, and primary bedroom. Marchetti heightened the courtyard’s capacity for crowds by including steel-and-glass sliding doors that open from the family room and the screened porch (which face each other) onto the courtyard.
“That has really worked out as far as entertaining goes,” Marchetti says. When the doors are open, there’s an openness that creates flow for more guests than one might imagine. “When you open the doors to the screened porch, you can easily fit 60 or 70 people in the home,” Varney says. “It’s not a grand home. It’s perfectly comfortable for a family of four or six. But the way Michael designed it, you can open it up. We’re about to give a shower for 50 people.”
Renowned landscape architect Ben Page worked with Marchetti to design a limestone water feature in the courtyard to highlight hand-painted tiles Goetz and Varney found while visiting Portugal. Page designated the four corners of the courtyard as planter areas and chose thin stainless-steel wire to create trellises along the walls. “Now the vines grow up the wall,” Marchetti says. “You feel like you’re in a terrarium.” The screened porch is carefully constructed with frames that allow glass panels to snap on during cold weather, making it easy and comfortable for friends and family to light the fireplace and use the screened porch year- round. The charming courtyard lures dinner guests outside to star gaze on warm evenings.
“The courtyard is magical at night,” says interior designer Barbara Rushton of Dimensional Spaces, who is the third member of this design dream team. Rushton bases her interior design approach on how her clients live, and her description of Goetz and Varney goes beyond their roles as enthusiastic hosts. “They’re very positive thinking and daring people,” Rushton says. “So, I wanted their interior to maintain that warmth that was necessary for their home to have.”
In the redesign, Marchetti converted the original living room into a library with a box-beam ceiling, a staple of Tudor Revival homes. Artisans crafted custom built-in cabinetry to fill the library with shelving to exhibit the couple’s memorabilia. Another of the original spaces was converted into a large dining room.
1 of 2
LAURA ROCKETT PHOTOGRAPHY
2 of 2
LAURA ROCKETT PHOTOGRAPHY
“The dining room is important to them because they entertain a lot of people,” Rushton says. The original dining table seated eight people, but Nashville’s Davis Cabinet Company enlarged it to sit 12. The wallpaper features a dreamy, pastoral landscape recreated from the art of local painter Charlotte Terrell (whose art also hangs over the fireplace in the screened porch).
Rushton says, “I’ve been lucky enough to be at dinner parties at that table, and you feel like you are in a park or forest, particularly in the evenings.” When envisioning the home’s redesign, Varney especially wanted a more oversized kitchen for cooking, a hobby the couple enjoys, but which Goetz has only recently discovered.
“For the first 37 years of our marriage, I did 100 percent of the cooking,” Varney says. “Dave is a nascent cook. He has tackled the New York Times cooking site’s hard recipes. We love cooking together in the kitchen.”
Luckily, Varney can bake her crowd-pleasing caramel cake and Goetz can perfect his beef Bourguignon in a kitchen designed specifically for them. Rushton and Marchetti created a bright white kitchen bathed in light from multiple windows along its walls. The vaulted ceiling is finished with wooden beams for Tudor authenticity and features gable windows. For added sleekness, black granite countertops run along the room’s sides. The massive kitchen island is topped by Montclair Danby marble, with its swooshing gray veins flowing against the white backdrop. Varney says, “The remodeled house has a lot of wonderful living spaces, and we are using it very differently from the way we used the old house. I’ve always loved Dave’s childhood home.”
The exterior elegance of a historic neighborhood endures when restoration and renovation are completed by a design dream team such as Marchetti, Rushton, and Page. As seen from the street, the guidelines that protect historic districts keep such areas from losing their character. It’s a balancing act where creativity meets commerce and modernity meets memorable. True beauty is discovered when history breathes via the architecture of a preserved neighborhood and its picturesque streets.
“Every day, I look out the windows and see what I saw as a child,” Goetz says. “The neighborhood is still intact. The views are still the same.”